Chapter 1: Tezwa Dusk settled upon the city of Alkam-Zar. Rays of deep-crimson sunlight flared through the seam of the horizon, casting a fiery glow across the sullen, steel gray clouds. Wind like a mournful cry twisted between the towering husks of buildings both ancient and modern -- all sinking now into decay and history.
Starfleet Ensign Fiona McEwan stood on the edge of a rubble-strewn plaza near the center of the battered metropolis. Alkam-Zar, like many other Tezwan cities, was still smoldering more than two weeks after it had been racked by a shock wave from a Klingon torpedo, which had destroyed a military starport several dozen kilometers away from the urban center.
These people probably thought the base's presence made them safer, McEwan mused. It just made them a target.
Behind the petite, red-haired young officer, a Federation relief team coordinated the distribution of food, clean water, and medicine to local Tezwans, who had lost most of their basic utilities because of the Klingon barrage. The relief group was composed of civilian workers and physicians. McEwan was one of six Starfleet security personnel assigned to protect them. Some relief groups, working in similarly war-torn urban areas around the planet, had been nearly overwhelmed by Tezwan refugees whose suffering and desperation had led to food riots; other groups had been ambushed by Tezwan military insurgents still loyal to the deposed prime minister, Kinchawn.
Today things had been quiet in Alkam-Zar. Most of its people were still in shock. Tezwan adults and children wandered the streets like gangly, looming phantoms. Their feather-manes were pale with dust and matted with neglect, their arm feathers tattered and scorched and stained with blood. Shuffling footsteps crunched across boulevards dusted with shattered glass and pulverized rock. Broken beams of metal crusted with ancient stone had impaled the ground and dotted the thoroughfares and side streets like monuments to a quiet despair.
So far, the Federation's efforts had focused on providing these people with the essentials of survival -- food, water, shelter, and basic medical treatment. Just two days ago the Starfleet Corps of Engineers had arrived, to direct the monumental task of rebuilding this world's ravaged cities.
For her part, McEwan was in no hurry to see the streets swept bare. If a Loyalist ambush were aimed at her squad, she would be grateful for all the cover she could get.
Thirteen more days, she reminded herself. Then I rotate back shipside. She had just begun her two-week deployment to the planet's surface and was already looking forward to her return to the Enterprise. Because she had risked her life during the commando mission that neutralized Tezwa's ground-based antiship artillery, she had been lucky enough to miss the first, grueling two-week rotation. Danilov had told her the reeking, insect-infested carnage in the major cities had left him with nightmares. Seo had described -- in a haunted monotone that made his nauseatingly vivid details all the more unsettling -- a guerrilla ambush in Anara-Zel that killed four security officers from the Republic. Danilov and Seo were frontline veterans of the Dominion War, so McEwan took their warnings seriously.
A keening cry, anguished and beautiful, cut through the heavy hush. Turning toward its source, McEwan looked up, toward the top of a twenty-story building rendered by war into a gutted frame. Standing like an emperor atop the structure was a lone Tezwan singer, his arms flung wide as if to embrace the sky. Nasal and piercing, his voice reverberated off smashed, hollow edifices painted with the dying light of day. McEwan's heart stirred with his projected grief, ached as it grasped the terrible emptiness of his operatic wails.
Without taking her eyes from the singer, she grabbed the sleeve of a young Tezwan boy who was walking past her. Holding him with one hand, she pointed with the other at the singer. "What's he singing?"
Following her gesture with stunned, distant eyes, the boy seemed utterly unmoved by the singer as he answered. "It's a sorrow-song. We sing for the dead."
McEwan stood, transfixed by the singer. His voice was like a majestic wolf cry, despondent beneath a shadowy dome of gray, casting on her an enthralling spell of mourning. The boy pulled away from her, and she let go of him. "Who's he singing for?"
The boy glanced up at the singer. As he turned away, he answered with an ominous emotional flatness, "The world."
She glanced at the boy, who plodded off, his daily ration of Federation emergency nutrition packs tucked under one arm. Then the singer's tune crested, pulling McEwan's eyes back to the top of the tower. For a fleeting moment the singer's voice filled every corner of Alkam-Zar. Then his music dropped away like a dying breath. A faint and tragic note rose and vanished into the heavens, like his soul taking flight. He leaned forward and pitched headfirst off of the building.
McEwan's cry of alarm stuck in her throat as she watched the singer plummet. He neither flailed nor cried out, but fell as if it was his destiny to do so. Empathetic dread swelled inside her as the singer's body accelerated.
He hit the ground with a dull, thick, wet crunch.
McEwan's horrified gasp was tangled up in her choking sobs. Burning tears ran from her eyes.
Fighting to compose herself, she turned slowly back toward the plaza. Behind her, the other Starfleet personnel watched in shock. A civilian woman with the relief team covered her mouth and began to weep. Many other relief workers turned away. A young doctor sprinted across the plaza with a surgical kit in his hand, apparently undeterred by the futility of his impending efforts. A Federation News Service reporter ran after him.
But all McEwan could see were the Tezwans, who continued to wait for their food packets and water rations, oblivious of -- or indifferent to -- the singer's gruesome end. Even more than his suicide, their numb disregard of it frightened her deeply.
Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she counted the days until she could leave this world and never see it again.
Geordi La Forge cinched his parka hood tighter around his face. He hunched his shoulders against the chilly acid rain, which misted, gray and cold, into a blackened and almost perfectly round crater. The circular depression had, until recently, housed one of Tezwa's formidable artillery pieces. A pool of ruddy mud at the pit's bottom grew deeper by the minute.
All around him, once-verdant hills were ragged with skeletonized trees and withering ground foliage. Wafting odors of decaying vegetation tainted the cold, ozone-scented morning air. The catastrophic environmental damage hadn't been caused by the implosion of the nadion-pulse cannon. It was the result of massive quantities of ash, dust, and other toxins hurled into the atmosphere by the retaliatory Klingon bombardment, which had all but annihilated the rank and file of the Tezwan military and obliterated its principal surface installations.
A Starfleet forensic engineering team slogged around the eroding sides of the crater. They scanned the area with tricorders and a variety of specialized devices. Ensign Emily Spitale and Lieutenant Mitchell Obrecht were members of La Forge's staff aboard the Enterprise. The other nine engineers were from the starships Republic, Amargosa, and Musashi. Judging from their long faces and exasperated sighs, La Forge concluded that this search was proving as fruitless as the twenty-nine others they had already conducted during the past week.
He shared their frustration. Mounds of preliminary evidence had suggested that the Tezwans' brutal weapons might have been based on Starfleet technology. Unfortunately, almost nothing had survived the hastily executed Starfleet commando strike. The six firebases and their antimatter reactors, as well as all thirty-six guns, had imploded. The vaporized facilities had left behind little more than their glowing-hot craters, which had taken nearly a week to cool to a temperature safe enough for on-site inspections.
Along with the physical remains of the artillery system itself, other evidence that had been encountered during the strike missions was now lost or out of reach.
Security Chief Christine Vale had reported discovering, as part of the underwater firebase in the Nokalana Sea, a camouflaged iris composed of chimerium -- a rare and restricted material to which only the Federation was known to have access. But when the undersea firebase imploded and sank into the planet's crust, it took the chimerium iris with it, beyond the reach of further analysis.
Assistant Chief Engineer Taurik had shown tremendous foresight in pirating large numbers of encrypted Tezwan military data files from a firebase computer in the Linoka Forest. Immediately after Captain Picard reported the seizure of the evidence, Starfleet Intelligence had exerted its authority and confiscated all copies of the files for its own secret investigation. Two weeks later there still was no word from SI regarding its findings -- or lack thereof.
The best evidence that the artillery system had originated in the Federation had come from acting First Officer Data's positronic memory, which had interfaced directly with the Solasook Firebase computer system. After his allegedly "unstable" performance during the Rashanar incident, however, Starfleet Command had expressed grave reluctance to accept the android's perceptions as incontrovertible evidence.
All of which left La Forge kneeling in the mud, a tricorder in one hand and not a shred of proof in the other.
Spitale deactivated her tricorder and turned toward La Forge. Her shoulders were slumped, her expression blank. "There's nothing here, sir," said the athletic young blonde.
"Maybe not on the surface," La Forge said, studying the scene with his cybernetic eyes. "Run a deep-level -- "
" -- icospectrogram and a dekyon resonance pattern," she said, ...
